Feelings of happiness and sadness are central to conscious experience, but we still know little about what happens in the brain when we have these feelings or how these feelings relate to the events in our lives.

My research combines computational modeling with neuroimaging, pharmacology, and neurophysiology to study the relationship between decision making and emotion across the lifespan and in people with depression. I developed a computational and neural model of happiness that links rewards and expectations to subjective feelings and to dopamine:

I helped develop The Great Brain Experiment, a smartphone app for cognitive science research that now has over 100,000 users. You can download it free for iPhone or Android. Take a few minutes to contribute to our research by playing the games!